A $500k engineer costs $2,000/day — $200 of LLM tokens for 20% more output is easy ROI
Yuchenj_UW · x · 2026-09-24
A back-of-envelope ROI argument: a $500k engineer costs about $2,000 per working day, so if $200/day of LLM tokens makes them 20% more productive — which the author says is absolutely true today — it's one of the easiest ROI cases in any company.
The takeaway: tokens aren't the expensive part; underutilized engineers are. Companies should err on the side of generous AI usage rather than rationing model spend.
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